Games, Religion, and Contemporary Politics

My paper pexplores the humanizing ethic of sport that counters the weighing imposition of authoritarian governments. I suggest that viewing sports through the philosophy of humanism provides a window into speaking about and addressing difficult topics like religion and politics in sporting spaces. Humanism is a lifestance that envisions and practices living well without organized religion, typically amongst individuals in a loose collective of nonbelievers. I argue that humanism can act as an interpretive framework through which sport becomes a site of ethical resistance. I draw upon humanist insights from religion and sport theorists like Eric Bain-Selbo, the theory of Olympism in conversation with early modern humanist philosophers like Albert Camus, values conveyed from prominent atheist professional athletes, and compare between the story of Springboks role in addressing the aftermath of the South Africa apartheid and the targeted effort amongst American female professional athletes against unjust governmental structures. 

Responding to C. Thi Nguyen’s recent work on the philosophy of games, I argue that both the history and form of the fantasy tabletop role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons have profound lessons for theological doctrine. I critique Nguyen’s brief treatment of D&D and argue that his own distinction between a ‘dish’ and a ‘recipe’ reveals the danger — navigated by players, religious studies scholars, and practitioners alike — of reducing games to rules, and theology to doctrine. This is a particularly salient danger for theological education, wherein students are familiarizing themselves not just with doctrines but what doctrine itself is and can do. Drawing from recent work on theological education and method, I argue that students must be brought to terms with the constitutive ambivalence of doctrine, and work to gain a more capacious understanding of doctrine’s varied uses, contexts, politics, and corresponding — but never containable — ways of life.

This paper illustrates the ways American Muslim teen girls in the U.S. heartland respond creatively, playfully, faithfully and politically to the precarity of their world through playing basketball. I map the various authorizing forces which impact girls’ ability to play basketball and how the girls play authorities against each other to achieve their goals. I show that they do this by playing up or downplaying basketball as a serious endeavor. Their desire to play is very serious, but they play to have fun. While some girls "fight to play" by finessing the meritorious and beneficial aspects of playing basketball to parents skeptical of their daughters “wasting time,” other girls "play to fight," using their platform as esteemed athletes for anti-war activism. I argue that through playing, Muslim teens recover a girlhood for themselves in a context bent on denying it to them while transforming the community around them.